Ettiquette????

Take that tuque off, mister
RUSSELL SMITH
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March 14, 2009 at 11:47 AM EDT
Dear Mr. Smith: If a guy sits down in a nice restaurant and eats without taking off his ball cap or his hipster tuque, does he just look like a jerk or is he actually being rude to the people around him?

The flouting of this kind of convention gets emotions strangely high. And perhaps that's why guys do it. They want to get us middle-class types to hyperventilate.
I have heard confident and quite beefy men talk about how they feel threatened in the street by guys who dress like the stars of gangsta rap (with the low jeans and the hoodies). They claim that such dressing is a deliberate reminder of prison and therefore of violence, and it is a silent challenge to all those around them. If you really feel that certain kinds of dress constitute a challenge to a fight, then you are going to either get into a fight yourself or you are going to start talking crazy talk about banning certain kinds of "anti-social" dress (as certain U.S. towns have actually done). And once you're on to banning clothing, it'll be books next.
So let's think about it calmly for a minute. Yes, of course a guy looks like a major dork if he sits and orders the seared tuna with mango-wasabi froth while wearing a hat that advertises some DJ product or skateboard oil. He will mortify his date, for one thing. But is he being offensive to the others in the restaurant, to the guys like me staring slack-jawed, wondering what the world is coming to? Not really. The wearing or not wearing of someone else's hat doesn't affect me in any practical way. I don't have to look at it.
Yes, maybe the guy is trying to sneer at the whole place, to show he's above these bourgeois fancies of respectability. So what? Let him. He's going to have a much harder time in life that way. Good luck to him.
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